THE federal government’s bungling has made a martyr out of Wen Ho Lee, who now appears to many people to have been the victim of racial profiling.

As a result, we are about to enter a dangerous period of American public life, when national security could be imperiled by a politically correct backlash.

Whether or not Lee was unfairly prosecuted because of his ethnic background, the fact remains that China is engaged in a massive effort to recruit men and women like him as intelligence agents.

Put another way, the Chinese communists themselves engage in racial profiling against Chinese-Americans – just as the KGB did with Russian-born Americans, and the Nazis did with Americans of German descent.

“They do it all over the world,” says James Lilley, an ex-CIA official and former U.S. ambassador to China. “They target these people and use them for obvious reasons. It’s the language, it’s the culture, it’s the vulnerability.”

Nicholas Eftimiades, the Defense Intelligence Agency senior intelligence officer whose 1994 book “Chinese Intelligence Operations” is the standard reference work on the subject, says there is no question Beijing focuses on overseas Chinese as potential intelligence assets.

“It’s a very aggressive program,” the author says. “The Chinese approach is very systematic and comprehensive [toward] their own ethnic group. It’s kind of hard not to notice something like that.”

On the other hand, it is hard for Asian-Americans not to notice how their people have been treated by the U.S. government in the past.

The interning of 70,000 Japanese-Americans suspected of disloyalty during World War II is a painful reminder of how quickly a minority group’s civil rights can evaporate in a national security crisis.

“China is the new bogeyman. That’s bad news for Chinese-Americans,” novelist Gish Jen opined in The New York Times on Friday.

She, like many Asian-American leaders, finds the Lee debacle “reason to raise the hue and cry.”

Fine, but let’s not lose our heads over this. There’s far too much at stake.

As Sinologist Steven Mosher details in his new book “Hegemon,” the People’s Republic of China is openly dedicated to the proposition that it should be the world’s superpower, and the U.S. is in its way.

“I think the [U.S.] government is wise to keep an eye on first-generation immigrants of any ethnic group whose government is unremittingly hostile to the U.S.,” Mosher says.

“We don’t do this to Indian-born scientists because the Indian government is not engaged in a massive espionage effort against the U.S.; China’s is.”

Furthermore, though Lee may have been abused by government prosecutors, but he has not been fully exonerated. He still hasn’t told American authorities why he copied extremely sensitive information, and what he did with the missing tapes.

Moreover, Lee engaged in precisely the kind of conduct consistent with the profile U.S. counterintelligence has developed of China’s secret agents.

None of this makes Lee guilty of espionage, obviously.

Now, though, American mishandling of the case has given Chinese propagandists a powerful weapon over American public opinion.

In Beijing recently, a Chinese cabinet official called a press conference to denounce espionage accusations as “a great slander against the Chinese nation [and] typical racial prejudice.”

Rubbish – so says a China-born immigrant now working at a high level of the U.S. government. The man, who asked not to be identified, says he knows from personal experience how hard Chinese intelligence works to recruit here.

“Most Chinese-Americans don’t see the efforts. They’re biased. They won’t open their eyes to what’s going on,” he says.

Despite this knowledge, the man says he feels emotionally divided by the way Lee has been treated, and can’t quite dismiss the feeling that all Chinese will be suspected of disloyalty.

“The government has to do a better job,” he says. “They have to collect solid evidence before making accusations.”

“That’s not what happened in the Wen Ho Lee case,” says Lilley. “The case was bungled beyond belief, and they made it look like he was discriminated against. They didn’t see all the implications of what they were doing.”